All right, so here’s a great game that shouldn’t take too long to explain. Famicom Detective Club was a short series made by Nintendo that dates all the way back to the NES. There were only three games made for the series, the first being made for the Famicom Disc System and the last being for the Satellaview, where gamers could order and buy games for their SNES via, well, satellite TV.

None of these games were released outside of Japan, but a remake of the second NES game in the series for the SNES was fully fan-translated, and that game can now be played. People who have played Super Smash Bros. Melee may also remember that you could get a trophy of Ayumi Tachibana, your female assistant through the game.

In Famicom Detective Club Part II, you play as an unnamed homeless boy who is found by a detective named Shunsuke Utsugi. Utsugi offers you a place to live as long as you work it off for him as an assistant detective.

After a short time working for Utsugi, the first serious case comes when the body of a female student washes up near a bridge. This girl is Yoko Kojima, and you are tasked with finding information that may explain the mysterious circumstances surrounding her death. You are eventually accompanied by one of her best friends, Ayumi Tachibana, who wants to find out the mystery behind Yoko’s death more than anyone. Amidst all of this, there are students who believe that the death of Yoko Kojima is linked to an old ghost story that surrounds Ushimitsu High School.

This is a text adventure game, so there’s no combat or anything of the sort. You navigate through menus to different areas and examine the scene, talk to people, anything you can in order to gather more clues and find the next thing that progresses the story. If you’ve ever played Phoenix Wright, the game is exactly like the investigation scenes. You talk to people, look for objects and other things in the backgrounds, and can show people items and such to question them. You absolutely cannot lose the game or get a game over. If you can’t go on with the story, then there is something you missed and you have to keep exploring until you find it. Nothing is permanently missable.

There is only one complaint I had about this game’s gameplay, and I’m sorry that it’s been so long that I can’t recall the exact details, but there’s several points through the game where you have to talk to people in order to progress the story. But I recall there being times where the story wouldn’t progress even if you picked every dialogue option until you did it twice or something, and considering the slow scrolling text speed of the game, that got pretty fucking annoying.

It also might have had something to do with that, even if you neglect to talk about things that are completely negligible to the story or mystery or characters, the game still won’t let you go on. Bottom line, talk to everyone, pick every choice at least twice, and when you’ve done that, go through all the dialogue prompts again in order just to make sure you didn’t miss something that gets you stuck later on and confuses the hell out of you and forces you to backtrack and check even more possible places you could have missed. That gets pretty annoying and boring, fast.

The graphics are superb. The detail and shading and everything about the characters and backgrounds are great, and there are several graphics and animated sequences done for specific special scenes to really get you into the story, if you know what I mean. It’s not always a head and a background like Phoenix Wright. At times you feel like you’re reading/watching a movie, which is cool and immersive. The music is always appropriate, not a whole lot of memorable tunes but not bad. Often times there isn’t any music playing, which is fine for this sort of game where you’re trying to read and remember shit.

I’d like to point out that while a bunch of things so far point to this being a horror story, it’s really not. It’s just a murder mystery/suspense story. There are certainly “scary” or tense moments in the story, but it’s not the focus of the game. Famicom Detective Club Part II takes a bit to get going and may seem boring at first, but it really pays off as the story gets increasingly more interesting up to the end. There are a lot of twists and turns that will surprise you, and a lot of moments that will have you on the edge of your seat.

I’d also like to note that while this is labeled as Part II, it is actually a prequel to the first game in the series, so you need no prior knowledge to understand everything that is going on. I first played this game when I was sick from school and I beat it all in one sitting (and it is like 8-10 hours long I think). It’s one of my fondest gaming memories. Famicom Detective Club Part II is a great game and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to read a great story.